Remember, all, or most, of these people have taken oaths to uphold the constitution; and, it's good to see some people take their oath seriously.
That is an important point to remember. Perhaps the most important one of all.
The President (and others) we collectively hired (whether we voted for him or not) was required to take an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution. He was not hired to protect the American people. That is critically important.
The Constitution demands that if the President (and others subject to that oath) must choose between maintaining the viability of the Constitution and keeping Americans safe, he must choose the Constitution, and the powers we grant him as Commander in Chief are only legitimately used in pursuit of that objective.
Of course, we encourage him to do both, if possible. And in many cases the requirement to defend the Constitution is well aligned with an interest in protecting the public. But he cannot say that his duty to protect americans, or to hunt down terrorists, or to keep the economy growing, or anything else necessitated ignoring all or a portion of the laws under which we all live.
Accordingly, a President should never compromise this responsibility by advocating change to the constitution itself. That would be like hiring a security guard to protect your house, who then suggests your house doesn't really need to be protected anyway.
Sometimes I think Bush forgets who he works for. Or maybe I just misunderstand who his employer is.
NSA CDR monitoring has been publically known about since 1999, when a lawsuit was filed over it in California.
That's pen register (trap and trace) monitoring, not CDR. And that's for international calls where U.S. domestic law does not apply. Unless you're thinking about something different than I. Can you cite a reference?
Pen registers only record the pre (for origination taps) or post (for termination taps) translation routing information and time. Essentially that boils down to "what the phone system was asked to do" (for origination taps) or "how the phone system responded to" (for termination taps) a call setup request. A CDR is different. The CDR contains all information the phone system considered relevant for the processing a call, including such things as the carrier selected, party to be billed for the call, whether it was an 800 call or a credit-card call, the credit card number used, whether the call was answered, how many times it 'rang', whether the call was forwarded, the translation schema used, which trunks were traversed, etc.
More to the point, while a pen register shows what was actually done, the CDR shows what the switch was told to say was actually done, regardless of what actually took place. Under certain circumstances that's considered to be the more correct behavior.
This is one of those cases where I curse the English language, despite it being my only language.
freedom is defined as the ability to take actions that you desire without being restricted
Freedom can be defined that way, meaning both being free to kill anyone weaker than yourself, as well as being free to escape being killed by anyone slower than yourself. That's the way it exists in Nature. Kipling's Law of the Jungle or Darwin's Survival of the fittest. Even the bird in a cage can be said to be free; He can fly anywhere his wings will take him, even to the very limits of his cage.
Liberty on the other hand, is a concept which exists only in the civilized world. It is not something granted by Nature, it is something which we choose to grant to others. So while we might have the freedom to invade other's privacy, if we are civilized, we grant them the liberty of keeping their privacy.
When dealing with the animal kingdom, therefore, we regularly claim the freedom to kill if it serves our purpose, without remorse. We also do not expect members of the animal kingdom to grant us any liberties. In this respect, you might say we treat terrorists as animals who just happen to be human. We are civilized, they are not.
If we climb into a lion's cage, for example, we know what we're getting into. And yet, despite being neither the strongest species nor the fastest, we seem to have become dominant nevertheless. If we choose to kill animals, nature will not object. even if we choose to make a species extinct. When we preserve a species, it is a liberty we are granting that species, often for our own reasons.
It's a novel concept, from the animal kingdom point of view. Completely counter-intuitive. By not demanding that all members of our species be both strong-enough to kill the weaker and fast enough to escape the slower, we seem to have created a species which is less-well adapted to our current environment, and consequently more adaptable to environments we haven't yet been exposed to; a clear recipie for total domination.
Whatever happened to the dream of everyone having perfect access to all information; "information wants to be free" they exclaimed, and yet, when that information is of value to themselves, they want to preserve it. They desire a monopoly upon it (a copyright which never expires), and in the process, have they not murdered the very dream of an open source society?
But you do have access to all information, just like every other animal on this planet. If you want my information (or my property, or my life) you are free to take it if you can take me. But if you want me to treat you as a member of the civilized world, then I expect you to grant me the liberty of personal privacy, even if you can take me. If you do not grant me that liberty, you have identified yourself as a member of the animal kingdom, and you should expect only to escape being killed by those slower than yourself.
Copyright (since you brought it up) is an excellent example of this being played out today. There's virtually nothing to keep you from ripping a CD and dumping in onto the Internet for everyone to have. You have an opportunity to grant (to the Author or Artist) the Liberty of respecting the human-created concept of Copyright, or you can claim the Freedom to copy anything you're strong enough to copy, and escape prosecution only from those you are fast enough to outrun. (But I'd caution you, civilization has taken-on badder beasts than you, and is still undefeated.)
So, in that line of reasoning, one might say the NSA, by refusing to respect the privacy of american citizens, are choosing to play by Kipling's Law. Which is why the civilized world is reacting to this as an uncivilized act. I wouldn't want to be the NSA right now. After all civilization has taken-on badder
...societies apparently eventually seem to self-regulate and converge to some point...
Get some perspective. The only societies which self-regulate to stability are the ones that survive. The ones that don't manage, don't survive. It's not a given, and there are plenty of examples of societies which self-destruct.
Furthermore, at just over two hundred years old, I'd say the jury is still in the early phases of deliberation on us as a nation. England has a good 800 on us and they're still pretty much in the race. Ancient Egypt lasted 4000. China is going on 8000. Even the Nazi's took fifteen years to shut down. We're just over four into this Administration.
With all due respect, you have no basis on which to so casually disregard the discussion.
Today, those who are saying anything at all are discussing the collection of CDR's. Essentially pre-processed billing information. But three months ago, it was "no domestic survelliance of any kind" and six months before that it was a "very limited program affecting, at most, a few thousand calls" and only then if one end was overseas and a known terrorist was involved. Before that, nothing but silence. The trend is clear.
...they'd still have less information about me than amazon.com already does.
You misunderstand the function of privacy, as most people do. It is important for you to have your privacy, even if your privacy is not important to you. It is important to me for you to have your privacy. This applies even in a universe which contains only you and I, and even if we both agree that we don't need our own privacy and don't mind if the other keeps their own entirely.
Do I care that you access port sites? Not in the least. Should I be concerned about you visiting porn sites? If you're an adult, it's really none of my business whether I care about it or not. But if I think you're underage, then I have a responsibility to care. Which means I have a responsibility to keep track of your age for the sole purpose of caring about you accessing porn sites in the event you happen to be underage. Maybe that would work if it's just us two. But with four billion people on the planet, if I spend all my time trying to keep track of every person's age, I'd have no time left to go after those sites that really are making money through the illegal act of allowing underage people to aggess porn.
Another example: I haven't taken my truck in to have the brakes checked in over a decade. If you drive the same roads I do, should you be concerned? Probably. But you wouldn't be if you knew I put less than 100 miles a year on my truck, and am a certified mechanic. But if you are a member of the Traffic Safety Board, and you run the local Jiffy Lube, and your Service Visit Database tells you I haven't been in for a decade, you might develop a healthy concern. Heck, as a business owner alone, you might spot a sales opportunity. But your lack of knowledge about the specifics of my case leads you astray. That's despite the fact that I don't care if you know I'm a certified mechanic, or that I hardly ever drive the truck anyway. If you're just the Jiffy Lube guy, it may mean I get extra junk mail. Now thats a BFD. If you're on the Traffic Safety Board, maybe a cop spends the afternoon needlessly checking my brakes over, when he could have been pulling drunks off the road. Maybe that's a BFD, maybe
not. If you're the NSA checking my phone records, and not understanding the legitimate reasons behind my suspicious calling pattern, it could mean wasting my tax money investigating some mechanic who doesn't drive his truck very much.
And as bad as Amazon.com might be, they still can't toss you into Gitmo without a hearing, even in time of war.
Privacy is an illusion.
Arguing that privacy doesn't exist, shouldn't exist, or doesn't matter is probably pointless. More correct to say my privacy exists only if you choose to make it exist. If (and only if) you choose to respect my privacy, then together we can build a society of mutual respect. If you choose not to, then we will quickly find ourselfes back in the jungle, where either of us can take from the other, depending on who's bigger.
But if privacy is irrelevant, why not have the NSA open-up the CDR's to everyone? Why should only the NSA be allowed to access that information. More to the point, if the Bush administration isn't doing anything illegal or anything (that it considers) immoral, why are they preventing the rest of us from finding out what's going on?
You have no basis for making this statement. The best you can say is that there have not yet been any alligation that domestic phone converstaions have been tapped as a part of this program.
You cannot state that as fact, nor should you infer that this is the only communication survelliance program in existence.
More correct to say we just don't know what the U.S. government is up to under the leadership of this administration. We do know how often their {mistakes/lies/fast talking} have led us astray in the past.
If you get an inkling that a system might have been compromised by a hacker, and notice the md5sum of/bin/login has changed, do you waste time looking for other things that might be out of place, or do you wipe the disk and reinstall?
People with disabilites are more concerned that ODF incorporate handling for text readers and such from the outset and not have to be bludgeoned into doing it later.
ODF (Open Document Format) is not an application. It is merely an open specification for how to represent the contents of an Office-type document.
People with disabilites are concerned that the applications which currently support ODF do not support text readers and such to the same level that the Microsoft Office suite supports those devices. With assistive technology, they can access electronically-stored documents in MS Office proprietary format better than they can (currently) access electronically-stored documents in ODF format (without using the plug-in).
But wait; there's a flaw to that argument Microsoft doesn't want anyone to notice.
When it comes to accessing electronically-stored documents, we are all handicapped. None of us can access any sort of electronically-stored document without the use of the assistive technology commonly known as a computer/operating system/office application stack. But if the document is stored in MS Office proprietary format, it becomes unavailable to those individuals who are handicapped by not having paid Microsoft a license to access the document, and there ain't no way around it.
Nobody want's to be disabled. But we all are, to some extent. Where disabilities can be reasonably addressed, they should, and I don't think anyone has any problem doing this where it's reasonable to do so. But to handicap the entire population in a half-assed attempt to make access more 'equal' for everyone is patently absurd.
Kudos to those disabled individuals who succeeded in convincing Microsoft to 'do the right thing' by making documents stored by their office suite accessible to people requiring less-common assistive technology, like text readers and such. Maybe they can help the rest of us (or the rest of us can help them) to convince Microsoft to once again 'do the right thing' and make documents stored by their office suite accessible to the rest of us. All they need to do is either open their file formats or support ODF.
In the meantime, those of us 'less disabled' disabled individuals will focus on building applications which allow electronically-stored documents to be accessed by everyone.
On a national level, defense, the Interstate system (which was funded as a defense project), basic science research, the list goes on. These don't benefit everyone directly but they do at least benefit everyone indirectly. Municipal wi-fi benefits a relatively wealthy segment of the population (those who can afford laptops and, to a lesser extent, those who can afford computers generally) at the disproportionate expense of those who cannot afford those fancy toys, and who don't derive indirect benefits either (so far no one's proposed a believable way in which municipal wi-fi benefits the poor, it's just a neat toy for Slashdotters and business people).
One could argue that the Interstate Highway system benefits only those wealthy-enough to own a car, but we both know that's not true. Besides, the question wasn't about whether everyone benefits, but rather whether everyone benefits equally.
And I'd say the jury's still out on how much ubiquitous broadband might benefit the poor. If broadband were as readily-available as, say, water and electric service, I suspect the cost would drop considerably. Indoor plumbing and electric light were also prohibitively expensive before universally available, and now are available to even the poorest. Most times, they're built right in, but I suspect I'm making obvious arguments at this point.
And while you might not think about the 'long tail' of benefits broadband access might provide to the poor, it's probably because those costs are in the noise for you. Paying bills on-line is nice, but when the alternative is $.39 a piece it adds up quickly. No one is required to file taxes on-line, but those who don't get a 4-6 week refund delay on top of that $.39 filing charge. Imagine how much less taxes might be lost on food stamp fraud if recipients could order their groceries on-line and receive direct benefits instead of cash-equivalents. That would require a revival of the on-line grocers and a build-out of the infrastructure it would require, which might happen if the percentage of people who can't afford to drive their own car had reasonable internet access instead.
Would it cost a lot to run a fiber to every farmhouse in Nebraska? Sure. Would it cost as much as running a 16 foot wide ribbon of concrete to the same destinations? Probably a lot less. And we've already done that. Might it change our whole society in the same way the automobile did?
More to the point (and I meant to put this in my previous post) it's not even really needed most places. As I drive around DC or Baltimore, I can pick up any number of wireless access points that are open for use (deliberately, although there are at least as many that are just left unsecured). Even in my small town in suburban Maryland, I know of at least two places with public wireless Internet and those are just the ones I've been to that have it posted on the door. The market pressure to put wireless access in is pretty strong where it makes sense to do so, and it tends to avalanche -- one business does it, and others follow to keep up and not lose their customers (who, in fact, tend to be the ones with disposable income as noted above, and are thus valuable customers worth keeping around).
You might be surprised to learn that WiFi is usually only available where the underlying fabric of hardwired broadband exists, and that once you get beyond the suburbs, broadband of any type (excluding satellite) is unavailable, even to us toy-loving, laptop-toting Slashdotters. The Interstate Highway system, rural electrification, the PSTN, none of these happened because of a private organization trying to gain first-mover advantage or protect their own market share. Your post is begining to sound a lot like "I got mine, so I don't care if you ever get yours..." taunt.
That's true, but that's exactly why municipal wireless access drives free-market access
No law says that you, Joe Anonymous Coward, cannot provide your neighbors a free or nonprofit wireless Internet service.
That's not technically true. You can provide a free or nonprofit wireless network service, but once it becomes inter-networked different rules apply. But I'll accept your argument in the spirit in which it was posted.
And there's an argument to be made there, which is: it would take tax money from all for the benefit of a subset of taxpayers.
That "take tax money from all for the benefit of a subset of taxpayers" is the very definition of Public Policy. The only form of taxation which wouldn't follow that rule would be some incredibly pedantic (and probably unworkable) implementation of Communism. Can you cite an example where tax money (or even non-tax money, for that matter) is spent in a way which does not benefit one sub-group over another?
So a municipal WiFi scheme amounts to the municipality saying "We are going to impose ourselves on this chunk of spectrum, making it less reliable for others to use besides ourselves."
WiFi is unregulated spectrum. You have no guarantee, and no right to demand, that anyone else reserve any portion of that spectrum for your usage.
This makes wireless less attractive to the free market, because who knows when some municipality will step in and try to steal your spectrum out from under you?
Your spectrum? That is the fallacy of this argument right there. That particular portion of spectrum (and almost no other) belongs to all of us. It does not belong to you. It does not belong to any one player in the free market no matter how much money they have.
It does tend to belong more to those in a specific geographic location than to those not present in that location, by nature of the fact that WiFi is a geographical-range-limited technology. And because of this, it makes sense for a muncipality (i.e. a democratically elected government assigned the task of governing a limited geographic area) to be interested in the prospects of providing this service.
And it doesn't need to be expensive, or necessarily impacting on scarch spectrum. Many muncipal network projects aim, for example, to lay pennies-per-meter fiber along side thousands-of-dollars-per-foot water and sewer lines (utilizing the same rights-of-way) which need to be run into every home anyway. The legislation many Carriers are proposing would make that particular economic efficiency illegal.
Heck, even internet access has tiers - you can pay $10 for dial-up, or you can pay $40 for much faster broadband or DSL.
No. you (presumably) can pay $40 for much faster broadband or DSL, but I cannot, because it's not offered in my area.
Additionally, one of the reason why it is available to you is because the groundwork for our national telecommunications infrastructure was paid-for collectively by all of us through the Universal Service Fund tax, and was run across rights-of-way that we all collectively own.
Your argument fails because it presumes that everyone has the opportunity to access higher-level tiers (which is incorrect).
But even if all tiers were available to both of us, the argument would still be flawed because it presumes your transaction with the first tier provided does not involve me. Your high-speed/high cost connection to some site makes use of public rights-of-way which are owned collectively by us all. Even a firm believer in private property must acknowledge my right (as a part owner of that right-of-way) to set the rents and benefit to the extent the market will support. Your scenario denies me that right.
Picture what would happen if your ISP said that because of increased traffic, not all messages will be sent with equal priority. You'd want to be able to make sure that your stuff got through when you needed it to, even if it meant paying an extra five dollars a month.
I picture an ISP (at least one in a position to do that) would quickly find it more profitable to service the high-paying customers than the low-paying ones, that investments in serving the upper-tier customers was more profitable than investments serving the lower-tier customers, and that service degradations to whichever tier of customers was currently paying the least invariably results in more higher-tier (and higher profit) customers.
Market solutions don't work in situations involving (natural or constructed) monopolies. Connectivity over 'the last mile' is a natural monopoly.
Market solutions are also inappropriate for situations involving collective ownership unless all perties can be guaranteed equal market power.
Or another Internet provider, who can differentiate themselves on "true Internet" service. Granted, I still think the tiered Internet idea should be shot down, but I'm sure it's won't be total instant adoption if it is allowed.
You're missing the meaning of internet.
Ask yourself this: If I have a (tierd) network, and you have a (un-tiered, free, "true", pick your favorite term) network and we internetwork them together, does your network 'un-tied' mine, or does my network 'tier' yours? Is the result a 'tiered' or 'un-tierd' internetwork?
If one of your customers wants 10Mbps throughput (or access to port 25, etc) of a customer on my network, will they get it, or will it be blocked?
The pipes in question are owned by the carriers and it should be their right to do with them what they see fit.
"Your Honour, the council for the defendent has misspoken."
Read the (proposed) bill. The pipes in question are the pipes which are run over public rights-of-way and for which (currently) a privately-owned company must apply to a local governmental entity for a right (franchise) to use. These are the 'last mile' pipes. They may own the pipes, but the pipes are (or would be) run along poles, buried under roads, or transmitted through the spectrum which we all own collectively.
This bill would allow such a private company to bypass the local control by applying for a national franchise.
If this were only about what private companies can do with their own pipes, the FCC would not be involved.
It any disaster(s) manage to wipe out all of New England, California, Florida, and Australia, I don't think I'll really care much about the survival of my pictures.
I suspect these are precisely the circumstances under which you'd start caring a lot about the survival of your pictures, especially if you have relatived or friends there.
While true, I can burn a dozen copies of my photo collection to DVD and mail them to relatives and friends in various parts of the planet. It any disaster(s) manage to wipe out all of New England, California, Florida, and Australia, I don't think I'll really care much about the survival of my pictures.
You are only considering disasters which share location as a common mode. Think outside the box. I could imagine many disaster scanarios which would wipe-out all of your photos on multiple continents.
How about a manufacturer recall due to a defect which causes premature bit-rot. One you don't hear about until it's too late. It wouldn't really matter if the disks were stored together or apart.
Or how about a mis-aligned read/write head on your burner. Sure, you verified each disk (on your own writer) after you burnt them, but now your drive is dead, and you discover no one else can read the disks you wrote.
Or, how about a lawsuit? The software you use to view the disks gets injunctioned off the market by a patent infringement lawsuit. (That almost happened with GIF, remember.) You did remember to back-up the viewer along with the photos, right? And an operating system to run it...
Or what if you can't find a DVD player? (What if the MPAA tells DVDCCA to stop licensing the manufacture of DVD players in a few years so that Disney can sell all those cartoons all over again to a new generation of toddlers without worrying about the turn-of-the-century-disks cannibalizing their new sales.)
And those are common-mode disasters. It wouldn't be too hard to come up with a dozen unique, plausible, reasons why 12 DVD's mailed to 12 different locations would be unrecoverable upon return 5, 10, or 50 years later. Let's see:
Never made it to destination
damaged in-transit:sending
damaged in-tranisit:returning
misplaced upon arrival
misfiled and lost
damaged through neglect
damaged through intent
stolen
guardian moved and left no forwarding address
guardian in jail
guardian deceased
discarded as unimportant ("Honey, you don't need to hang onto that old thing. You haven't even seen a birthday card in 30 years. And besides, he sent 11 other copies to other people, surely they couldn't have all gotten discarded. If he ever does ask for it back, just say you never got it, or it was damaged in transit...")
Floods are not the only disaster which can affect valuables such as photos. And there are actually very few such disasters which would completely destroy a photo while leaving a digitized version of that photo intact. Make sure you have a safe location to store the copies. While you're at it (perhaps even before) you might want to make sure you've got a safe location for the originals.
By far the hardest, costliest, riskyest, and most time consuming part of this process will be arranging a several-thousand photo collection to be scanned. If you are going to take that step, I'd recommend you arrange to wind-up with both a digitized copy and an old-fashioned one.
We have a good understanding of what it takes to preserve photos, with almost 200 years to learn from our screw-ups. We don't have the same experience with digital artifacts, and the experiences we do have says we're abysmal at it. Physical objects can survive thousands (millions?) of years by accident while we've all experienced the loss of digital ones which were important just seconds ago.
If these photos are important,
Move the originals to a safe location, today.
Arrange to have physical copies made. (Go ahead and have digital ones made, too, if that makes you happy.)
Store the copies in a safe location, too, but define 'safe' differently. (Safe from what? Fire? Flood? Theft? Copyright infringement? Rivaluos siblings? CDROT? Sunlight fading? Obscurity? Prying eyes? Obsolescence?
Also be aware that making a digital copy of some things (like a photo) can introduce threats which were not there before. A machine jam while scanning or improper handling of unstable photos can cause irreparable loss. I'd hate to see your precious photo collection lost completely to a freak minor auto accident or random theft. Also beware that digitizing a photo is a lossy process: no matter how high a resolution you have a photo scanned at, there will always be some information which cannot be recovered from the digitized version, should the original be lost.
And finally, understand that the simple act of making a digital backup of something like a photo makes the original a tempting target for disposal in the name of 'efficiency'. If everyone in the family has a digital copy of every photo in the box, it might be a lot easier to justify leaving the box in the basement for the termites. And once the box is gone, will you really care about your copy on your crashed hard disk, when you're sure you can get another copy from anyone else at the next reunion. Until you find-out everyone else was counting on getting a new copy from you...
But if they ran a time server, their customers would continue to use it yet they would get nothing* in return.
Or, worse yet, some other clueless bottom-of-the-market router manufacturer might hardcode their NTP server address and then they're be paying out-of-pocket to support some other company (who would probably play the denial, accuse, litigate, hush-up game.) And who wants to deal with that?
I think the jury's still out on that. Those who are making the case that this is (or would be) a bad thing are doing so based only on historical precedent.
Ever since the development of Strowger's automated (as opposed to operator-driven) call switching, an underlying principle of telecommunications (long since codified into law) was the ideal that the switching system should not make routing decisions based on the content of the call. (It's considered fair-play for a carrier to, for example, route a over a satellite circuit vs. an undersea cable based on whether it is a FAX/DATA call, but not based on wether it's a business vs. personal call.) This is the fundamental basis behind the concept of network neutrality.
One could argue that without some concept of network neutrality, we can't really say we even have a telecommunication system. I'm not sure there's a good example of a system akin to what the Republicans are proposing here, which is a system where public rights-of-way are privatized into a handful of companies with monopoly control. The closest I can come-up with off-hand would be what was done in the era of the railroad tycoons. Not a perfect match, since in that age the railroads did not lead into every home, nor was the economy as dependent on them as ours is today in the Internet.
...letting people who are on faster connections have priority seems like it will drive companies to provide a better service faster and might also reduce the cost of slower connections... or am I wrong?
My opinion only, but yes, you're wrong.;-)
The fear is that these companies will be driven by the interests of their shareholders, rather than the interests of the society. The two points of contention seem to be:
The Carriers are dependent on public rights-of-way to build their networks, so it's not really fair for them to benefit more from that right-of-way than I do simply because they are in a position to use more of it than I. If we are in support of private ownership, I should be able to sell my private citizens portion of that right-of-way to the highest bidder in the same way that the Carriers are demanding to be allowed to do. (Not really fesible, but that's why we have things like Regulation.
The Carriers are exploiting a natural monopoly and network effects to further their business model. If spectrum were limitless and if running fiber across long distances did not create an effective barrier-to-entry for new market participants, then the Carriers arguments about letting the markets decide might have some validity. But market forces are always distorted under monopoly conditions.
History (both railroad and telecommunications) tells us that when a single entity is in control of the network, evolution of that network proceeds slowly, and only in a way as to increase control and profitibility. Let us not forget; between automatic switching (circa 1890's) and the 1984 breakup of AT&T, the two big telephone company innovations were DTMF dialing and the lighted dial Princess Phone(TM)
The railroads fell only when an alternate infrastructure (the Interstate highway system and, to a lesser extent, commercial aviation) was built along side the existing network infrastructure. The Internet, as we commonly know it today, took-off as a result of the break-up of the Bell System monopoly and legislated network-neutrality. Prior to the 1997 Telecommunication Reform act, the Carriers were prohibited from offering data services (like AOL or CompuServe did) specifically to prevent them from favoring one provider over another. AOL, CompuServe, Earthlink, and the like, using modems and the fact that the telephone companies were required to carry these calls even though it prectically bankrupted many of them, were the impetus behind the
Expect a hefty new federal tax on your broadband access to pay for this new universal access.
You are probably correct. But consider the alternative.
Under the Republican-led administration, the FCC has defined broadband to mean 'anything above 56Kbps' and has taken an skeptical eye toward network neutruality. The upshot: There are a lot of people who can sometimes get bandwidth faster than plain old dialup, but it's just barely faster. (768Kbps down, 192Kbps up? Come on!) In the United States, the trend is clearly toward a privatized, two-tier Internet.
It's a tough pill to swallow, but in the US, network neutrality is linked to Universal Service. The Carriers can't restrict usage of the first 56Kbps of bandwidth (basically, one voice channel) because they didn't pay for it; it was paid for by the Universal Service Fund. But they will argue (and their argument will have legs) that everything beyond the level funded by USF is theirs to play with as they please. That speaks for a future where broadband is available in many (but not all) places, but only for a Carrier-set price.
From a policy standpoint, we are headed back into the days where there was only one monopoly running the telecommunications system, the network they built is geared only toward supporting the services most profitable to them, and no other applications will be tolerated. We're even seeing the return of the days where you don't own the telephone in your home, you just rent it from the phone company. Except now it's not a telephone, but the cable modem or the VoIP box, or the Satellite DVR, etc.
The window is closing. The only hope we have to ensure that meaningful broadband infrastructure exists for any of us is to ensure it exists for all of us. As much as it sucks, we need to ensure a USF-style plan is put in place to run broadband access out to 'every farmhouse in Nebraska' before the Carriers do it, because once the Carriers do it, they will own it.
Yes they do. But they do not generally own the complete right-of-way where the fiber lies. That's the part the carriers want to gloss-over.
Proponents of network neutrality should remember that fiber (copper, cable, wireless packets, etc) are being run across right-of-way (poles, roadsides, or spectrum) which belong to the public. The public, therefore, should demand a right to a portion of the bandwidth that right-of-way makes available, or the public should exercise it's right to terminate those carrier access rights.
The carriers are (as of right now successfully) arguing that the "public access" portion of that bandwidth is just 56Kbps. They argue this on the basis that only voiceband connectivity is provided-for under Universal Service Fees funding.
So, do you want to pay a Universal Service Fee tax in order to fund broadband deployment out to every farm in Nebraska, or are you willing to cede everything above 56Kbps to the whims of the carrier shareholders?
Or do I just have the wrong name for the same principle?
The phrase "common carrier", in general, eans pretty much what you think it means. In a nutshell, if you've paid the fare you get a seat. You can't be denied service just because of who you are. Or, if we're talking about freight, if you've paid to have the freight moved, the carrier must deliver the freight. They don't get to look inside the boxes.
If you rob a bank and try to make your getaway on a public bus, the cops don't get to arrest the bus driver for driving the getaway vehicle. If I'm delivering stolen goods via UPS, they can't be held accountable for delivering the stolen goods since they didn't get to look inside the box.
In terms of telecommunications, Common Carrier Status has a specific legal meaning which encompases both rights and responsibilities of a (telephone) company providing a service. In the traditional sense, a telephone company has to allow you to call whomever you like, provided you pay for the call. They can't choose to only let you call, for example, the funeral home owned by the operator's husband and not allow calls to the competitor.
In exchange they can't be held liable if I harrass you over the phone.
In the pre-internet days, it was a blessing to the phone companies. Then they figured out they could make a whole lot of money by, for example, buying a stake in a funeral home then making sure the competitor wouldn't get as many calls.
Nowadays, the FCC decides what qualifies for Common Carrier status. The network operators don't want to be hobbled by it. And the current view of the FCC is that traditional voiceband communications (defined as pipes less than 56Kbps) are Common Carrier, but "broadband services" are exempt.
So, "common carrier" you understand, and you got it right. "Common Carrier Status" is something a bit different.
...the paper trail needs some securing for rechecks...
Can you help me to understand this recent fascination with having the voter's intent recorded twice? Why do we need two different copies of a voter's ballot, presumably an ephemeral one and a 'real one' that we 'trust' if for some reason we decide we can't trust the ephemeral one?
We agree it's necessary to record the voter intent as evidence as opposed to testimony. Why then do we waste any effort at all trusting the testimony when the physical evidence is available?
I think the operative phrase here is "Never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."
So, while we have a right to get upset if it's proven that malice was involved, we shouldn't be concerned if our democracy fails through simple incompetence.
I do agree that a FOSS voting system would be the best way to ensure accountability and reliability of the software.
Then go back to reading through the rest of the responses in this thread. Once you've figured out how you're going to guarantee that the openly-reviewed voting machine code is the same code actually running on the machine (I'm in a good mood today, so I'll just let it slide that you we'd somehow be able to catch all the bugs...) then feel fee to use the "Submit" button again.
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That is an important point to remember. Perhaps the most important one of all.
The President (and others) we collectively hired (whether we voted for him or not) was required to take an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution. He was not hired to protect the American people. That is critically important.
The Constitution demands that if the President (and others subject to that oath) must choose between maintaining the viability of the Constitution and keeping Americans safe, he must choose the Constitution, and the powers we grant him as Commander in Chief are only legitimately used in pursuit of that objective.
Of course, we encourage him to do both, if possible. And in many cases the requirement to defend the Constitution is well aligned with an interest in protecting the public. But he cannot say that his duty to protect americans, or to hunt down terrorists, or to keep the economy growing, or anything else necessitated ignoring all or a portion of the laws under which we all live.
Accordingly, a President should never compromise this responsibility by advocating change to the constitution itself. That would be like hiring a security guard to protect your house, who then suggests your house doesn't really need to be protected anyway.
Sometimes I think Bush forgets who he works for. Or maybe I just misunderstand who his employer is.
Pen registers only record the pre (for origination taps) or post (for termination taps) translation routing information and time. Essentially that boils down to "what the phone system was asked to do" (for origination taps) or "how the phone system responded to" (for termination taps) a call setup request. A CDR is different. The CDR contains all information the phone system considered relevant for the processing a call, including such things as the carrier selected, party to be billed for the call, whether it was an 800 call or a credit-card call, the credit card number used, whether the call was answered, how many times it 'rang', whether the call was forwarded, the translation schema used, which trunks were traversed, etc.
More to the point, while a pen register shows what was actually done, the CDR shows what the switch was told to say was actually done, regardless of what actually took place. Under certain circumstances that's considered to be the more correct behavior.
Freedom can be defined that way, meaning both being free to kill anyone weaker than yourself, as well as being free to escape being killed by anyone slower than yourself. That's the way it exists in Nature. Kipling's Law of the Jungle or Darwin's Survival of the fittest. Even the bird in a cage can be said to be free; He can fly anywhere his wings will take him, even to the very limits of his cage.
Liberty on the other hand, is a concept which exists only in the civilized world. It is not something granted by Nature, it is something which we choose to grant to others. So while we might have the freedom to invade other's privacy, if we are civilized, we grant them the liberty of keeping their privacy.
When dealing with the animal kingdom, therefore, we regularly claim the freedom to kill if it serves our purpose, without remorse. We also do not expect members of the animal kingdom to grant us any liberties. In this respect, you might say we treat terrorists as animals who just happen to be human. We are civilized, they are not.
If we climb into a lion's cage, for example, we know what we're getting into. And yet, despite being neither the strongest species nor the fastest, we seem to have become dominant nevertheless. If we choose to kill animals, nature will not object. even if we choose to make a species extinct. When we preserve a species, it is a liberty we are granting that species, often for our own reasons.
It's a novel concept, from the animal kingdom point of view. Completely counter-intuitive. By not demanding that all members of our species be both strong-enough to kill the weaker and fast enough to escape the slower, we seem to have created a species which is less-well adapted to our current environment, and consequently more adaptable to environments we haven't yet been exposed to; a clear recipie for total domination.
But you do have access to all information, just like every other animal on this planet. If you want my information (or my property, or my life) you are free to take it if you can take me. But if you want me to treat you as a member of the civilized world, then I expect you to grant me the liberty of personal privacy, even if you can take me. If you do not grant me that liberty, you have identified yourself as a member of the animal kingdom, and you should expect only to escape being killed by those slower than yourself.
Copyright (since you brought it up) is an excellent example of this being played out today. There's virtually nothing to keep you from ripping a CD and dumping in onto the Internet for everyone to have. You have an opportunity to grant (to the Author or Artist) the Liberty of respecting the human-created concept of Copyright, or you can claim the Freedom to copy anything you're strong enough to copy, and escape prosecution only from those you are fast enough to outrun. (But I'd caution you, civilization has taken-on badder beasts than you, and is still undefeated.)
So, in that line of reasoning, one might say the NSA, by refusing to respect the privacy of american citizens, are choosing to play by Kipling's Law. Which is why the civilized world is reacting to this as an uncivilized act. I wouldn't want to be the NSA right now. After all civilization has taken-on badder
Get some perspective. The only societies which self-regulate to stability are the ones that survive. The ones that don't manage, don't survive. It's not a given, and there are plenty of examples of societies which self-destruct.
Furthermore, at just over two hundred years old, I'd say the jury is still in the early phases of deliberation on us as a nation. England has a good 800 on us and they're still pretty much in the race. Ancient Egypt lasted 4000. China is going on 8000. Even the Nazi's took fifteen years to shut down. We're just over four into this Administration.
Oh dear, I seem to have Godwin'd myself.
With all due respect, you have no basis on which to so casually disregard the discussion.
Today, those who are saying anything at all are discussing the collection of CDR's. Essentially pre-processed billing information. But three months ago, it was "no domestic survelliance of any kind" and six months before that it was a "very limited program affecting, at most, a few thousand calls" and only then if one end was overseas and a known terrorist was involved. Before that, nothing but silence. The trend is clear.
You misunderstand the function of privacy, as most people do. It is important for you to have your privacy, even if your privacy is not important to you. It is important to me for you to have your privacy. This applies even in a universe which contains only you and I, and even if we both agree that we don't need our own privacy and don't mind if the other keeps their own entirely.
Do I care that you access port sites? Not in the least. Should I be concerned about you visiting porn sites? If you're an adult, it's really none of my business whether I care about it or not. But if I think you're underage, then I have a responsibility to care. Which means I have a responsibility to keep track of your age for the sole purpose of caring about you accessing porn sites in the event you happen to be underage. Maybe that would work if it's just us two. But with four billion people on the planet, if I spend all my time trying to keep track of every person's age, I'd have no time left to go after those sites that really are making money through the illegal act of allowing underage people to aggess porn.
Another example: I haven't taken my truck in to have the brakes checked in over a decade. If you drive the same roads I do, should you be concerned? Probably. But you wouldn't be if you knew I put less than 100 miles a year on my truck, and am a certified mechanic. But if you are a member of the Traffic Safety Board, and you run the local Jiffy Lube, and your Service Visit Database tells you I haven't been in for a decade, you might develop a healthy concern. Heck, as a business owner alone, you might spot a sales opportunity. But your lack of knowledge about the specifics of my case leads you astray. That's despite the fact that I don't care if you know I'm a certified mechanic, or that I hardly ever drive the truck anyway. If you're just the Jiffy Lube guy, it may mean I get extra junk mail. Now thats a BFD. If you're on the Traffic Safety Board, maybe a cop spends the afternoon needlessly checking my brakes over, when he could have been pulling drunks off the road. Maybe that's a BFD, maybe not. If you're the NSA checking my phone records, and not understanding the legitimate reasons behind my suspicious calling pattern, it could mean wasting my tax money investigating some mechanic who doesn't drive his truck very much.
And as bad as Amazon.com might be, they still can't toss you into Gitmo without a hearing, even in time of war.
Arguing that privacy doesn't exist, shouldn't exist, or doesn't matter is probably pointless. More correct to say my privacy exists only if you choose to make it exist. If (and only if) you choose to respect my privacy, then together we can build a society of mutual respect. If you choose not to, then we will quickly find ourselfes back in the jungle, where either of us can take from the other, depending on who's bigger.
But if privacy is irrelevant, why not have the NSA open-up the CDR's to everyone? Why should only the NSA be allowed to access that information. More to the point, if the Bush administration isn't doing anything illegal or anything (that it considers) immoral, why are they preventing the rest of us from finding out what's going on?
You have no basis for making this statement. The best you can say is that there have not yet been any alligation that domestic phone converstaions have been tapped as a part of this program.
You cannot state that as fact, nor should you infer that this is the only communication survelliance program in existence.
More correct to say we just don't know what the U.S. government is up to under the leadership of this administration. We do know how often their {mistakes/lies/fast talking} have led us astray in the past.
If you get an inkling that a system might have been compromised by a hacker, and notice the md5sum of /bin/login has changed, do you waste time looking for other things that might be out of place, or do you wipe the disk and reinstall?
ODF (Open Document Format) is not an application. It is merely an open specification for how to represent the contents of an Office-type document.
People with disabilites are concerned that the applications which currently support ODF do not support text readers and such to the same level that the Microsoft Office suite supports those devices. With assistive technology, they can access electronically-stored documents in MS Office proprietary format better than they can (currently) access electronically-stored documents in ODF format (without using the plug-in).
But wait; there's a flaw to that argument Microsoft doesn't want anyone to notice.
When it comes to accessing electronically-stored documents, we are all handicapped. None of us can access any sort of electronically-stored document without the use of the assistive technology commonly known as a computer/operating system/office application stack. But if the document is stored in MS Office proprietary format, it becomes unavailable to those individuals who are handicapped by not having paid Microsoft a license to access the document, and there ain't no way around it.
Nobody want's to be disabled. But we all are, to some extent. Where disabilities can be reasonably addressed, they should, and I don't think anyone has any problem doing this where it's reasonable to do so. But to handicap the entire population in a half-assed attempt to make access more 'equal' for everyone is patently absurd.
Kudos to those disabled individuals who succeeded in convincing Microsoft to 'do the right thing' by making documents stored by their office suite accessible to people requiring less-common assistive technology, like text readers and such. Maybe they can help the rest of us (or the rest of us can help them) to convince Microsoft to once again 'do the right thing' and make documents stored by their office suite accessible to the rest of us. All they need to do is either open their file formats or support ODF.
In the meantime, those of us 'less disabled' disabled individuals will focus on building applications which allow electronically-stored documents to be accessed by everyone.
One could argue that the Interstate Highway system benefits only those wealthy-enough to own a car, but we both know that's not true. Besides, the question wasn't about whether everyone benefits, but rather whether everyone benefits equally.
And I'd say the jury's still out on how much ubiquitous broadband might benefit the poor. If broadband were as readily-available as, say, water and electric service, I suspect the cost would drop considerably. Indoor plumbing and electric light were also prohibitively expensive before universally available, and now are available to even the poorest. Most times, they're built right in, but I suspect I'm making obvious arguments at this point.
And while you might not think about the 'long tail' of benefits broadband access might provide to the poor, it's probably because those costs are in the noise for you. Paying bills on-line is nice, but when the alternative is $.39 a piece it adds up quickly. No one is required to file taxes on-line, but those who don't get a 4-6 week refund delay on top of that $.39 filing charge. Imagine how much less taxes might be lost on food stamp fraud if recipients could order their groceries on-line and receive direct benefits instead of cash-equivalents. That would require a revival of the on-line grocers and a build-out of the infrastructure it would require, which might happen if the percentage of people who can't afford to drive their own car had reasonable internet access instead.
Would it cost a lot to run a fiber to every farmhouse in Nebraska? Sure. Would it cost as much as running a 16 foot wide ribbon of concrete to the same destinations? Probably a lot less. And we've already done that. Might it change our whole society in the same way the automobile did?
You might be surprised to learn that WiFi is usually only available where the underlying fabric of hardwired broadband exists, and that once you get beyond the suburbs, broadband of any type (excluding satellite) is unavailable, even to us toy-loving, laptop-toting Slashdotters. The Interstate Highway system, rural electrification, the PSTN, none of these happened because of a private organization trying to gain first-mover advantage or protect their own market share. Your post is begining to sound a lot like "I got mine, so I don't care if you ever get yours..." taunt.
That's not technically true. You can provide a free or nonprofit wireless network service, but once it becomes inter-networked different rules apply. But I'll accept your argument in the spirit in which it was posted.
That "take tax money from all for the benefit of a subset of taxpayers" is the very definition of Public Policy. The only form of taxation which wouldn't follow that rule would be some incredibly pedantic (and probably unworkable) implementation of Communism. Can you cite an example where tax money (or even non-tax money, for that matter) is spent in a way which does not benefit one sub-group over another?
WiFi is unregulated spectrum. You have no guarantee, and no right to demand, that anyone else reserve any portion of that spectrum for your usage.
Your spectrum? That is the fallacy of this argument right there. That particular portion of spectrum (and almost no other) belongs to all of us. It does not belong to you. It does not belong to any one player in the free market no matter how much money they have.
It does tend to belong more to those in a specific geographic location than to those not present in that location, by nature of the fact that WiFi is a geographical-range-limited technology. And because of this, it makes sense for a muncipality (i.e. a democratically elected government assigned the task of governing a limited geographic area) to be interested in the prospects of providing this service.
And it doesn't need to be expensive, or necessarily impacting on scarch spectrum. Many muncipal network projects aim, for example, to lay pennies-per-meter fiber along side thousands-of-dollars-per-foot water and sewer lines (utilizing the same rights-of-way) which need to be run into every home anyway. The legislation many Carriers are proposing would make that particular economic efficiency illegal.
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Then why does this link disagree?
Seriously, if any slashdot jerk (like me) can come-up with this in a half minute, the spammers won't be far behind, with help or without it.
No. you (presumably) can pay $40 for much faster broadband or DSL, but I cannot, because it's not offered in my area.
Additionally, one of the reason why it is available to you is because the groundwork for our national telecommunications infrastructure was paid-for collectively by all of us through the Universal Service Fund tax, and was run across rights-of-way that we all collectively own.
Your argument fails because it presumes that everyone has the opportunity to access higher-level tiers (which is incorrect).
But even if all tiers were available to both of us, the argument would still be flawed because it presumes your transaction with the first tier provided does not involve me. Your high-speed/high cost connection to some site makes use of public rights-of-way which are owned collectively by us all. Even a firm believer in private property must acknowledge my right (as a part owner of that right-of-way) to set the rents and benefit to the extent the market will support. Your scenario denies me that right.
I picture an ISP (at least one in a position to do that) would quickly find it more profitable to service the high-paying customers than the low-paying ones, that investments in serving the upper-tier customers was more profitable than investments serving the lower-tier customers, and that service degradations to whichever tier of customers was currently paying the least invariably results in more higher-tier (and higher profit) customers.
Market solutions don't work in situations involving (natural or constructed) monopolies. Connectivity over 'the last mile' is a natural monopoly.
Market solutions are also inappropriate for situations involving collective ownership unless all perties can be guaranteed equal market power.
The Market is not a universal solution.
You're missing the meaning of internet.
Ask yourself this: If I have a (tierd) network, and you have a (un-tiered, free, "true", pick your favorite term) network and we internetwork them together, does your network 'un-tied' mine, or does my network 'tier' yours? Is the result a 'tiered' or 'un-tierd' internetwork?
If one of your customers wants 10Mbps throughput (or access to port 25, etc) of a customer on my network, will they get it, or will it be blocked?
"Your Honour, the council for the defendent has misspoken."
Read the (proposed) bill. The pipes in question are the pipes which are run over public rights-of-way and for which (currently) a privately-owned company must apply to a local governmental entity for a right (franchise) to use. These are the 'last mile' pipes. They may own the pipes, but the pipes are (or would be) run along poles, buried under roads, or transmitted through the spectrum which we all own collectively.
This bill would allow such a private company to bypass the local control by applying for a national franchise.
If this were only about what private companies can do with their own pipes, the FCC would not be involved.
You could have only a (digital) copy of the original, or (especilly if digitizing off negatives) you could get a reprint as well.
I suspect these are precisely the circumstances under which you'd start caring a lot about the survival of your pictures, especially if you have relatived or friends there.
You are only considering disasters which share location as a common mode. Think outside the box. I could imagine many disaster scanarios which would wipe-out all of your photos on multiple continents.
How about a manufacturer recall due to a defect which causes premature bit-rot. One you don't hear about until it's too late. It wouldn't really matter if the disks were stored together or apart.
Or how about a mis-aligned read/write head on your burner. Sure, you verified each disk (on your own writer) after you burnt them, but now your drive is dead, and you discover no one else can read the disks you wrote.
Or, how about a lawsuit? The software you use to view the disks gets injunctioned off the market by a patent infringement lawsuit. (That almost happened with GIF, remember.) You did remember to back-up the viewer along with the photos, right? And an operating system to run it...
Or what if you can't find a DVD player? (What if the MPAA tells DVDCCA to stop licensing the manufacture of DVD players in a few years so that Disney can sell all those cartoons all over again to a new generation of toddlers without worrying about the turn-of-the-century-disks cannibalizing their new sales.)
And those are common-mode disasters. It wouldn't be too hard to come up with a dozen unique, plausible, reasons why 12 DVD's mailed to 12 different locations would be unrecoverable upon return 5, 10, or 50 years later. Let's see:
By far the hardest, costliest, riskyest, and most time consuming part of this process will be arranging a several-thousand photo collection to be scanned. If you are going to take that step, I'd recommend you arrange to wind-up with both a digitized copy and an old-fashioned one.
We have a good understanding of what it takes to preserve photos, with almost 200 years to learn from our screw-ups. We don't have the same experience with digital artifacts, and the experiences we do have says we're abysmal at it. Physical objects can survive thousands (millions?) of years by accident while we've all experienced the loss of digital ones which were important just seconds ago.
If these photos are important,
Also be aware that making a digital copy of some things (like a photo) can introduce threats which were not there before. A machine jam while scanning or improper handling of unstable photos can cause irreparable loss. I'd hate to see your precious photo collection lost completely to a freak minor auto accident or random theft. Also beware that digitizing a photo is a lossy process: no matter how high a resolution you have a photo scanned at, there will always be some information which cannot be recovered from the digitized version, should the original be lost.
And finally, understand that the simple act of making a digital backup of something like a photo makes the original a tempting target for disposal in the name of 'efficiency'. If everyone in the family has a digital copy of every photo in the box, it might be a lot easier to justify leaving the box in the basement for the termites. And once the box is gone, will you really care about your copy on your crashed hard disk, when you're sure you can get another copy from anyone else at the next reunion. Until you find-out everyone else was counting on getting a new copy from you...
Or, worse yet, some other clueless bottom-of-the-market router manufacturer might hardcode their NTP server address and then they're be paying out-of-pocket to support some other company (who would probably play the denial, accuse, litigate, hush-up game.) And who wants to deal with that?
I think the jury's still out on that. Those who are making the case that this is (or would be) a bad thing are doing so based only on historical precedent.
Ever since the development of Strowger's automated (as opposed to operator-driven) call switching, an underlying principle of telecommunications (long since codified into law) was the ideal that the switching system should not make routing decisions based on the content of the call. (It's considered fair-play for a carrier to, for example, route a over a satellite circuit vs. an undersea cable based on whether it is a FAX/DATA call, but not based on wether it's a business vs. personal call.) This is the fundamental basis behind the concept of network neutrality.
One could argue that without some concept of network neutrality, we can't really say we even have a telecommunication system. I'm not sure there's a good example of a system akin to what the Republicans are proposing here, which is a system where public rights-of-way are privatized into a handful of companies with monopoly control. The closest I can come-up with off-hand would be what was done in the era of the railroad tycoons. Not a perfect match, since in that age the railroads did not lead into every home, nor was the economy as dependent on them as ours is today in the Internet.
My opinion only, but yes, you're wrong. ;-)
The fear is that these companies will be driven by the interests of their shareholders, rather than the interests of the society. The two points of contention seem to be:
History (both railroad and telecommunications) tells us that when a single entity is in control of the network, evolution of that network proceeds slowly, and only in a way as to increase control and profitibility. Let us not forget; between automatic switching (circa 1890's) and the 1984 breakup of AT&T, the two big telephone company innovations were DTMF dialing and the lighted dial Princess Phone(TM)
The railroads fell only when an alternate infrastructure (the Interstate highway system and, to a lesser extent, commercial aviation) was built along side the existing network infrastructure. The Internet, as we commonly know it today, took-off as a result of the break-up of the Bell System monopoly and legislated network-neutrality. Prior to the 1997 Telecommunication Reform act, the Carriers were prohibited from offering data services (like AOL or CompuServe did) specifically to prevent them from favoring one provider over another. AOL, CompuServe, Earthlink, and the like, using modems and the fact that the telephone companies were required to carry these calls even though it prectically bankrupted many of them, were the impetus behind the
You are probably correct. But consider the alternative.
Under the Republican-led administration, the FCC has defined broadband to mean 'anything above 56Kbps' and has taken an skeptical eye toward network neutruality. The upshot: There are a lot of people who can sometimes get bandwidth faster than plain old dialup, but it's just barely faster. (768Kbps down, 192Kbps up? Come on!) In the United States, the trend is clearly toward a privatized, two-tier Internet.
It's a tough pill to swallow, but in the US, network neutrality is linked to Universal Service. The Carriers can't restrict usage of the first 56Kbps of bandwidth (basically, one voice channel) because they didn't pay for it; it was paid for by the Universal Service Fund. But they will argue (and their argument will have legs) that everything beyond the level funded by USF is theirs to play with as they please. That speaks for a future where broadband is available in many (but not all) places, but only for a Carrier-set price.
From a policy standpoint, we are headed back into the days where there was only one monopoly running the telecommunications system, the network they built is geared only toward supporting the services most profitable to them, and no other applications will be tolerated. We're even seeing the return of the days where you don't own the telephone in your home, you just rent it from the phone company. Except now it's not a telephone, but the cable modem or the VoIP box, or the Satellite DVR, etc.
The window is closing. The only hope we have to ensure that meaningful broadband infrastructure exists for any of us is to ensure it exists for all of us. As much as it sucks, we need to ensure a USF-style plan is put in place to run broadband access out to 'every farmhouse in Nebraska' before the Carriers do it, because once the Carriers do it, they will own it.
Yes they do. But they do not generally own the complete right-of-way where the fiber lies. That's the part the carriers want to gloss-over.
Proponents of network neutrality should remember that fiber (copper, cable, wireless packets, etc) are being run across right-of-way (poles, roadsides, or spectrum) which belong to the public. The public, therefore, should demand a right to a portion of the bandwidth that right-of-way makes available, or the public should exercise it's right to terminate those carrier access rights.
The carriers are (as of right now successfully) arguing that the "public access" portion of that bandwidth is just 56Kbps. They argue this on the basis that only voiceband connectivity is provided-for under Universal Service Fees funding.
So, do you want to pay a Universal Service Fee tax in order to fund broadband deployment out to every farm in Nebraska, or are you willing to cede everything above 56Kbps to the whims of the carrier shareholders?
Your choice.
The phrase "common carrier", in general, eans pretty much what you think it means. In a nutshell, if you've paid the fare you get a seat. You can't be denied service just because of who you are. Or, if we're talking about freight, if you've paid to have the freight moved, the carrier must deliver the freight. They don't get to look inside the boxes.
If you rob a bank and try to make your getaway on a public bus, the cops don't get to arrest the bus driver for driving the getaway vehicle. If I'm delivering stolen goods via UPS, they can't be held accountable for delivering the stolen goods since they didn't get to look inside the box.
In terms of telecommunications, Common Carrier Status has a specific legal meaning which encompases both rights and responsibilities of a (telephone) company providing a service. In the traditional sense, a telephone company has to allow you to call whomever you like, provided you pay for the call. They can't choose to only let you call, for example, the funeral home owned by the operator's husband and not allow calls to the competitor.
In exchange they can't be held liable if I harrass you over the phone.
In the pre-internet days, it was a blessing to the phone companies. Then they figured out they could make a whole lot of money by, for example, buying a stake in a funeral home then making sure the competitor wouldn't get as many calls.
Nowadays, the FCC decides what qualifies for Common Carrier status. The network operators don't want to be hobbled by it. And the current view of the FCC is that traditional voiceband communications (defined as pipes less than 56Kbps) are Common Carrier, but "broadband services" are exempt.
So, "common carrier" you understand, and you got it right. "Common Carrier Status" is something a bit different.
What common carrier status? Common Carrier applies only to traditional (TDM) telephone carriers, and only for the first 56Kbps of pipe.
I know we'd all love to be able to demand a neutral network for our Internet, but it's just doesn't work that way.
Can you help me to understand this recent fascination with having the voter's intent recorded twice? Why do we need two different copies of a voter's ballot, presumably an ephemeral one and a 'real one' that we 'trust' if for some reason we decide we can't trust the ephemeral one?
We agree it's necessary to record the voter intent as evidence as opposed to testimony. Why then do we waste any effort at all trusting the testimony when the physical evidence is available?
So, while we have a right to get upset if it's proven that malice was involved, we shouldn't be concerned if our democracy fails through simple incompetence.
Then go back to reading through the rest of the responses in this thread. Once you've figured out how you're going to guarantee that the openly-reviewed voting machine code is the same code actually running on the machine (I'm in a good mood today, so I'll just let it slide that you we'd somehow be able to catch all the bugs...) then feel fee to use the "Submit" button again.